Behind the scenes at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology

archaeological registration

Julia Triezenberg is a junior majoring in American culture and minoring in museum studies. She has looked for ways to be involved in the museum world, so she spent this past summer interning for the Registry Department at the Kelsey. During her time with us, Julia assisted with exhibitions, worked with researchers using the collections, and worked independently on a ceramics rehousing project. Her internship offered her diverse ways to explore a museum career.

Over the course of my summer interning at the Kelsey, one thing is for certain: I spent a lot of time around pots. “Pots?” you ask. “What kind of pots?” “Do they keep better company than other kitchenware?”

Why yes, they do. I wasn’t surrounded only by pots, either — the project I worked on for over a month dealt with finding new homes for a variety of ceramics from excavation sites in Seleucia, Iraq. An extension of previous interns’ work, I reorganized and housed the ceramics from three of the Kelsey’s cabinets. While that might sound simple at first, it was no small task. Depending on the shape and size of the artifacts, there could be hundreds of artifacts in each drawer that had to be moved individually for their safekeeping. It was especially confusing for me in the beginning because the objects were quite mixed up by shape and size when I began.

With this in mind, I decided to move the ceramics between the three cabinets based on their size and function to see how I could improve future organization. I was able to condense space in quite a few of the drawers, which proved especially helpful as the Kelsey prepares to officially accession some ceramic objects from the Toledo Museum of Art. Final steps included editing the Kelsey’s new database to reflect my changes and leaving behind my procedure and advice to future interns’ work with the collection.

Rehousing these ceramics was one of many things I did while at the Kelsey, but it was a project that gave me specific opportunities to formulate my own plan about the reorganization and work independently to get it done. Other college students spent their summer lifeguarding poolside or backpacking through the Rocky Mountains. This is what I spent my summer doing — and I couldn’t have been happier about it.